Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Last month, ZDNet published an interview with MongoDB CEO Max Schireson which took the position that the document databases, such as MongoDB, are better-suited to today's applications than traditional relational databases; the title of the article implies that the days of relational databases are numbered. But it is not, as Schireson would have us believe, that the relational database community is ignorant of or has not tried the design paradigms which he advocates, but that they have been tried and found, in many cases, to be anti-patterns. Certainly, there are some cases in which the schemaless design pattern that is perhaps MongoDB's most distinctive feature is just the right tool for the job, but it is also misleading to think that such designs must use a document store. Relational databases can also handle such workloads, and their capabilities in this area are improving rapidly.

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab, I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known before, some of which could have implications for PostgreSQL performance. These are issues which I haven't heard discussed before in the PostgreSQL community, and they are somewhat subtle, so I thought it would be worth writing about them.